CIP Browser

This Canton Improvement Proposal recommends a hybrid, tiered architecture for a name resolution service that maps human-readable metadata to machine-readable identifiers, such as Canton Party IDs, to serve the needs of regulated financial institutions. The proposed architecture classifies metadata into tiers by mission-criticality, with highly trusted services serving critical mappings and less trusted services serving less critical ones, allowing institutions to bring their own existing name resolution mapping sets into the Canton ecosystem. This approach enables a balance between security, trust, and usability, addressing the limitations of Canton's current Party ID system, which uses opaque strings that are not human-usable.

This Canton Improvement Proposal introduces a free base duration for preapprovals, defaulting to 90 days, to solve the bootstrapping problem caused by the removal of validator liveness rewards. The mechanism involves introducing a new configuration parameter and changing transfer preapproval creation and renewal to charge only for expiry extensions beyond the base duration. This change allows validators to create and renew preapprovals using just traffic costs, while maintaining backwards compatibility and sufficient protection against overloading Supervalidator nodes.

The Canton Improvement Proposal introduces Canton Naming, a registry for human-readable .canton names that resolves to Canton parties on-chain, providing a single source of truth for identity and discovery. The protocol is designed to be decentralized, with a pool of registrars selling name records to end users, backed by a shared on-chain registry operated by a collective Decentralised Registry Operator. This allows for reliable name resolution and is governed by consensus among approved registrars, enabling parameters like pricing and vote thresholds to be agreed upon and stored in the Name Registry contract.

CIP 0106 proposes a standardized protocol for secure interaction between App Providers, Validator Node Providers, and Security Auditors within the Daml ecosystem. It defines how App Providers publish Daml packages with verifiable build metadata and request security audits, and how auditors publish results to Git-based repositories. This enables Validator Node Providers to discover and verify audit outcomes, fostering trust and informed decision-making for third-party package integration without requiring direct auditing capabilities.